DuckDuckGo Metasearch Service Causes Quacks
April 12, 2022
DuckDuckGo followed its technology brethren by rescinding most of its services in Russia due to the unfortunate invasion of Ukraine. The unbiased search engine CEO Gabriel Weinberg stated on March 9 that it would down rank Russian Web sites that spread disinformation. Much to DuckDuckGo’s surprise (as well as many others), the search engine was attacked by right-leaning, pro-free-speech supporters. The privacy search engine unintentionally attracted these supporters but did not discourage them.
Recode via Vox has the entire story: “The Free Speech Search Engine That Never Was.”
Weinberg tweeted his support for user privacy, but conservative supporters who used DuckDuckGo to search for content without Big Tech censorship were angry. They did not like that DuckDuckGo was demoting Russian propaganda Web sites. Oddly enough, these people also were pro-Putin’s invasion on Ukraine.
Right-wing supporters flocked to DuckDuckGo, because it was supposedly free of censorship that plagues other search engines like Google. These conservatives believe that information relating to their political and social beliefs was censored in all search engines except DuckDuckGo. These conservative supporters are more of the alt-right, conspiracy theorist type, i.e., anti-vaccination, DC capital insurrection. DuckDuckGo was okay with this:
“So DuckDuckGo surely knew what many of its new fans were coming to it for. They leaned into it a bit, too. Weinberg told Fox News and Quartz that Google’s search results were biased because Google collects data on users, which it then uses to target results to them. That, he said, created filter bubbles that further polarized society. Because DuckDuckGo didn’t collect data, its results were unbiased and searchers were free from Google’s echo chamber. This was a bit of a dodge; conservatives accused Google of intentionally keeping conservative sites and content off of its results, not just returning results influenced by a searchers’ interests. But it was an answer that seemed to satisfy users of all political persuasions. The alt-right wingers do not like that, but DuckDuckGo explained they are doing what search engines should be doing: “ensure that users were getting the best results for their searches.”
DuckDuckGo is one of many platforms that the alt-right adopted: Rumble, MeWe, Telegram, Substack. These platforms did not sky away from the users, because it meant more investments. We like the idea of a metasearch service protecting user privacy and, as a byproduct, false propaganda. Now how about better results?
Whitney Grace, April 12, 2022
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